[NFBF-L] Fwd: [BlindApples] How a treaty signed in Marrakesh made the Library of Congress more accessible, The Washington Post

[Ryan Mann]

> How a treaty signed in Marrakesh made the Library of Congress more accessible
> By Danny Freedman
> February 15, 2022 at 9:00 a.m. EST
>  
> Braille and specially formatted audiobooks in Portuguese for a fifth-grader? The “Outlander” series in Braille? Various works by Nietzsche in Spanish audio? Books in Finnish for someone in hospice care?
>  
> Such requests are not unusual for the Library of Congress’s National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled. What’s dramatically changed for the library service and its 310,000 patrons is how those requests are answered. A year and a half ago “we would’ve had to just say, ‘Sorry, there’s no way we can get this,’ ” says Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, the NLS’s foreign language librarian. “And now we can.”
>  
> The surge of content in this admittedly niche realm is the result of a treaty signed in 2013 in Morocco, which only began bearing fruit in the United States in late 2020 after years of legislative work. Under the pact, known in short as the Marrakesh treaty, more than 100 nations so far have agreed to amend copyright laws to more easily allow for the creation — and the sharing across borders — of audio and electronic Braille versions of published works for people who are blind, have impaired vision or any disability that prevents their use of printed media. That includes disorders such as dyslexia and physical conditions that, say, inhibit someone from holding a book. Treaty nations can swap directly or through an online central clearinghouse. In late January, that catalogue listed about 730,000 items in more than 80 languages.
>  
> The same improved access is also now true for Braille music. Oft-requested musical scores that the Library of Congress never could seem to get permission to reproduce in Braille, such as Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” suddenly are on the shelf. So are a growing list of tunes — including works by Adele and Billy Strayhorn and Bach — that each would have taken the library weeks to transcribe into Braille. “It’s like leapfrogging over months and months of work,” says Mary Dell Jenkins, an NLS music librarian.
>  
> While the National Library Service is no stranger to change — at 90 years old, it has traveled technology’s evolution from phonograph discs to downloads — this shift leads Corlett-Rivera to refer to the past as “the Before Times.”
>  
> U.S. law already allowed the NLS and authorized nonprofits to create accessible books without permission from the copyright holder. But the treaty extends that to music and scripts, and creates the crucial ability to pool resources with the world. For the NLS to produce its own version of a Nietzsche book in Spanish might’ve taken six months to professionally narrate, edit and build in the descriptive and navigational features that differentiate accessible audio from commercial audiobooks and those made with text-to-speech software. Instead, Corlett-Rivera was able to pluck a recording from a participating library in Spain.
>  
> The NLS is now stocking its digital shelves to broaden its reach, the potential for which may be wider than ever. About 22 percent of the U.S. population age 5 and older speaks a language other than English at home, and the number of adults 40 and over with vision loss has been predicted to double by 2050, to 25 million. Separate from the treaty, the NLS also changed who can certify a person’s eligibility for its services, previously only physicians but now also teachers, reading specialists, librarians and others. In less than a year, that change led to a 43 percent increase in the number of reading patrons on the NLS roster, up to roughly 19,200.
>  
> “It really is a shopping spree every day,” Corlett-Rivera told me. By late January, the service had added nearly 1,200 audiobooks, 370 in electronic Braille and 410 music instruction books or scores. More than a thousand other books were in the queue, awaiting delivery or undergoing the process of reformatting and cataloguing needed to join the NLS system.
>  
> The highest demand is for materials in Spanish, and those books will continue to be about 70 percent of the foreign language collection. But since November 2020, when NLS added its first books via the treaty, it has also bolstered its offerings in Arabic, including Ahmed Saadawi’s prizewinning book “Frankenstein in Baghdad”; in French, with books such as George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Fire and Ice” series; plus books in Polish, Italian, German and beyond.
>  
> As queries have bubbled up from the NLS’s nationwide network of affiliated libraries, which are patrons’ primary points of contact, Corlett-Rivera has also sought titles in Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Korean, Somali, Hmong and Albanian, among others — including English. Some of the service’s most popular English audiobooks are Amish romances imported from Canada. “We have a lot of patrons that are into that good, clean, happy reading,” she says, “and Amish romance really checks all the boxes.”
>  
> In turn, the NLS is sharing more than 100,000 of its own items through the treaty that are finding audiences around the world. The effort here, though, is still in its infancy.
>  
> I asked Tiffany Anderson, a 30-year-old in Clayton, N.C., who is blind and seeking work as a Spanish interpreter or tutor, about the new resource, but it was the first she had heard of it. Anderson had been searching, with little luck, for middle-grade Spanish Braille books to read alongside the audio, to keep up her pronunciation and spelling. She was excited, though, about the potential soon to more readily “have that option, like everyone else.”
>  
> Success for now, Corlett-Rivera says, is still measured by collecting, rather than usage, which is a slender fraction of the 21.5 million items the NLS circulated last fiscal year. But she expects that to change in the year ahead, and so do some network libraries.
>  
> “It’s still a little newish for us,” says Sarah Jacobson, director of the Texas Talking Book Program in Austin. She expects interest will gather steam as more Spanish materials become available, and possibly a tool for patrons to search the global index themselves.
>  
> The deepening and the spread of this complex exchange, unfolding during a pandemic, is simply taking the time it needs, she says. “The primary goals for librarians is to get patrons what they want … and have them be able to have more fulfilled lives,” she says. “I think the impact will be huge.”
>  
> Danny Freedman is a journalist based in Memphis.
>  
> from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/02/15/how-treaty-signed-marrakesh-made-library-congress-more-accessible/
>  
> Richard
>  
>  
> My web site; https://www.turner42.com/
>  
> Richard
>  
>  
> My web site; https://www.turner42.com/
>  
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